skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That was almost exactly my thoughts after reading the article. Almost, because I didn't know much about the solution proposal part, that's what I learned today.

But I don't think the author didn't know these. I think he did, but was trying too hard to defend Microsoft. If you take a look at the blog, it's not hard to see that he's a Microsoft fanboy. I'm not saying that to launch an ad hominem attack, or to denounce him. We're all fanboys, and that's natural. But natural rarely means the best that can be. He's a great example.

I'm really glad that I read the comments on HN before writing something. Feels good to know there are still sane people on the earth.
RESTful Audio Processing Web API Released
SpaceX Falcon 9 Statement on First Stage Engine Anomaly
Well, to be honest, I have deep-scripted accessing HN, but I tend only to use it when doing big data crunching on trends and similar. When providing cross-references I've usually just put the IDs - actually counting points, comments and age is something I've not done for a while.

Don't think I'll bother again, I get enough grief and hate-mail just from trying to point people at earlier conversations.
Hitting the (un)clrd button in the nav bar, then hitting the "Open a new tab" button (i.e., the "mini-tab") reliably crashes Firefox ESR.

(Firefox ESR is Firefox's analog to Ubuntu LTS.)
I don't see how intention matters in a patent dispute anyway.
Various audio processing algorithms (loudness normalization, noise reduction, etc.) are available through a free REST API, focused on audio post production.
These questions have very little to do with software development as practiced by 99% of developers. They relate to computer science, a branch of mathematics with different concerns.

I've been developing software professionally for 23 years. I have a BSc in Computer Science [1] and an MSc in a computing-related field. And I have never needed to be able to answer questions like these to do my job. I have a vague understanding of big-O notation, and equally vague knowledge of the characteristics of various algorithms like heapsort, but thats all. If I need a sort algorithm then the framework or standard library provides a selection, all written by smarter people than me.

If you are developing a relational database or Google-scale distributed platform then, yes, you probably need to know this stuff. But most developers don't. I have to understand how to capture customer requirements, fit them into systems that already exist, estimate and implement them quickly and reliably, deal with the practical details of IIS or an RDBMS, maintain code, etc. I wonder if the author needs to get out more.

[1] Badly named, I learned little real comp sci.
GNU epsilon
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/8/3227284/samsungs-directions...

Particularly interesting is the last slide, #126, which includes in its Directions For Improvement "Remove a feeling that iPhone's menu icons are copied by differentiating design"
Haha this is so true. Thank you.
This is linkbaiting at its best.

Groklaw is arguing that he cannot find the actual phrase that the media used over and over again in the documents but the jurors didn't decide on the case over that phrase (I'm not getting into the actual verdict or my personal opinion on it), nor they decided according to what the media said on those days.

They did based on what Apple and Samsung attorneys argued on the trial, and they both presented a lot of evidence to make their own case.

Whats more, even Groklaw admits "I didn't grab all the exhibits, simply because it got incredibly expensive. But I have almost all of them, certainly the ones that seemed most interesting".

Id admire that he is willing to sit through the paperwork but this is beyond pointless. If something was said that was not on the evidence records and somehow misrepresent the situation I'd assume that Samsung lawyers would jump on it. Same for Apple.

If Groklaw is making the case that the media did a poor job and started using and reusing a phrase that was not on the records, well, thats a problem for the media but not, as CNET suggests, a problem with the veredict itself.
Sprint Launches StarStar Me To Replace Your Phone Number With Your Name
Will this unified kernel for ARM devices affect Android (in a good way) at all? Does it mean we're looking at a future where an Android image could be installed on different ARM devices?
And here's the humor part:

"Don't report bugs on my software! It's my baby and don't you dare to point out its flaws!!1"
Sure: interned strings.
Hacker News For Startup Communities
Many are biased (objects > functions), several are not useful and a few are plain wrong.

Meh.
Cool -- I actually hit n or log(n) on a couple of these. Neat! Most of the rest I'm right at the n^2. Guess I still have a long way to go.
I had a similar (or identical?) experience with engineering. I "learned" much of it in school. Some of it was really challenging, and I quite frankly, did not understand it well. What's odd is that I put in a lot of effort in school. But it didn't stick. I just couldn't get it all.

Fast forward 16 years. I spent 6 years as a practicing engineer, followed by 10 doing other things. But now when I look back at a book that I had trouble with in school, it seems very straightforward. I've forgotten some of the math, but in general, everything is easier now.

Is this because learning this sort of thing takes time to sink in? (I did not actively study engineering after quitting my engineering job). Is it a matter of context? Things to compare the concepts to? Or even biological age?

Also interesting that I have not found this to be at all the case with programming, which I learn much like anything else - a bit at a time with no "leaps" in understanding.
Well, most early returns are avoided mostly because it makes it harder to understand the code. But when you use guard clauses, like on your Linux Kernel example, you actually improve the code, because you reduce cyclomatic complexity (everything is now a linear path: a -> b -> c), you can reduce nesting, you can avoid unnecessary mutable state... so it's a win. The problem with early returns is when you use them in non-obvious places.

I believe that the majority of programmers agrees that using early returns for guard clauses is an okay exception.
So what exactly constitutes a "market"? And what is the magic "share" below which we should stop worrying? Comcast and AT&T have less than 50% of internet provider market in US, but even that causes all kinds of problems.
Doesn't seem to be the whole story, since the video clearly shows a significant amount of debris. A simple shutdown wouldn't produce debris, although the loss of internal pressure on the engine bell could cause it to collapse and possibly disintegrate.

I look forward to seeing a more complete analysis.
There was an antitrust lawsuit from Be about the OEM shit, but it was settled out of court for only $23 million without MS admitting any wrongdoing http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/84708/Microsoft_Be_re... likely because Be was near dead by that point.
Yes they were. They were unionized under the '60s Republican governors.
As usual, already written in the bible:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000038.html
Cheers for the link, I will take a look at that.
Bubbling Servers: 3M Uses Boiling Liquid to Remove Heat
I think it may make porting Android easier, if porting the kernel will become trivial (hopefully).
Yeah, but they are really important to know for interviews. Which of course may or may not have anything to do with the actual life of a developer, but that's life.
The road ahead: How we’ll get to 54.5 mpg by 2025
Startup Revolution
The situation for Linux on ARM is better than it was 10 years ago, but it is still chaos at the low levels.

Most of this has to do with cost. Each of the silicon vendors has their own IP which is bundled with their SoC; things like serial ports, PLLs, etc.. I don't foresee a time when a nearly universal standard like the 16550 on x86 is going to be available across major SoCs. The situation with USB controllers isn't too bad, but nearly everything else is unique to one vendor or another.

Since we're commonly populating 1Gbyte of RAM on these high-end ARM systems for phones and tablets, I'm curious to see how the transition to 64-bit is going to go. I'm sure it will be hilarious... and by that I mean there will be a lot of broken-ness for quite a while.

I'm not real hot on Intel for battery-powered mobile devices, because I don't see major cost or power-consumption advantages. But if Intel can make it easy to transition to newer chips, that could be one significant advantage.
"able to identify NP problems" ? Most of the problems we face are NP. Maybe he was meaning NP-complete problems. See http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NP-Problem.html for the definition.
If fairness is a fundamental or key part of a nation's identity or principles, then removing that fairness is an attack on the nation and is a national security matter. Securing a nation isn't just ensuring that foreign people don't steal it.
That is very strange.
Of course, no theory is worth more than bag of beans unless it makes testable predictions about the universe.

Wen says that his theory has significant implications for the states of matter that existed soon after the Big Bang but doesn't develop the idea into specific predictions.

It's always so disappointing to look for the rubber-meeting-the-road part of a theory and see that the tires are still spinning a few feet above the ground.
Tesla Model S Service Contract: $600/Year, Or Warranty Voided
Ask HN: How to get the most out of an accelerator?
Hi all,

I am due to start what seems to be a very good accelerator program in the next fortnight.

This is a 3 month intense program with a big demo day at the end. There will be lots of introductions made and seminars in between.

Just wanted to get peoples opinion as to how I can get the absolute most out of these 3 months. I really want to give it my all and come out the other end feeling like I have achieved something.

Are there any pitfalls to be avoided?

How can I maximize all the opportunities that present themselves to me?

Any advice or thoughts on the above or anything else are greatly appreciated.
Except Google doesn't have any monopolies, so it's legal.
Startup Accelerators are Entrepreneur Boot Camps
I think there are programming-specific ones.

For example, on attitude: Learning to be patient. Patient with planning the right solution, selecting the right libraries, fixing bugs, dealing with other developers who may not be as experienced as you, etc. I think patience is an overlooked "programmer's virtue."
This is a rather silly question.

Why is math hard? It's not all hard, some math is simple enough for 1st graders to understand.

Why is the math I am currently studying hard? Because you already learned the easy stuff and moved on to the hard stuff.

Why does it take a long time to understand all the different things that can happen when you combine simple ideas in arbitrary ways? Because there are a lot of different ways to combine them.

Why is the body of knowledge so large? Because people have been contributing to it for thousands of years.
I think your webpage should tell the visitor what Pow is, and/or what Anvil is a front end to.
Amazon makes it easier for IT to track apps bought from its marketplace
Your individual hardware is not like a city. Poor analogy.

This is like saying that your microwave manufacturer has a monopoly on your microwave. Just buy another microwave.
I'd need to cost out how much I'd need to spend to get a decent MVP.

Sometimes with outsourcing you just swap coding hours for project management hours. I know from experience it takes a lot to keep a distributed team on track.
"We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events." -- Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, Fast and Slow.

I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. -- Ecclesiastes 9:11﻿
I was thinking mainly about software companies, as per the examples given in the XKCD hover text. Physical service providers like ISPs are a bit trickier to consider, as it is possible for a company with only 1% of the national market share to be a monopoly in a particular region. That's the problem with ISPs, local monopolies in some places.
A free Bootstrap admin theme (that doesn't suck)
It's not about being able to implement them, it's about understanding the implications. Yes, I can do arithmetic by reaching for a calculator, but if I had to use a calculator for every single blesséd piece of arithmetic, I would find it impossible to do any kind of significant algebra.

Having the basics immediately to hand, without having to look them up, is needed to move on to the next level. Knowing how to recognize a bipartite graph means that when there's one around you're likely to think - hmm, I wonder if that's bipartite? recognizing the problem to be solved sometimes requires that you have a deep and fundamental understanding of the types of solutions that exist.

People seem constantly to say this - I can look it up on Google, why do I need to know this? I constantly solve problems my colleagues can't (and vice versa) because I have a deep familiarity with a range of techniques that they can look up any time they want, but don't recognize "in the wild."
That's exactly the point I was making. Symfony developers are similar batch of developers like you see with Rails - writes tests, utilizes frameworks/components, very active in open-source.

Any developer, PHP or otherwise, that knowingly ignores contributions within the community is dangerous :)

No matter what language you use, you can always write better code, even with PHP!
Before you let it rest in your project folder, you can try to pitch your idea at a startup weekend or similar event (basically, hackers, designers and business people spend a weekend trying to "create" a startup, usually building a MVP and doing some customer validation).

If your pitch includes "I have a mailing list of X persons who are very interested in this and would love to spend money on it", then it is going to stand out. It is usually possible to build a really rough proof-of-concept in that time, and you can use that to validate your idea, to a certain extent. If you are lucky, you might even find some developers who find this project interesting enough to continue working on it after the weekend.

But you'll need some luck for this to work perfectly, so if you are super-serious about it, try the paths outlined by others here.
Thanks! Maybe I have skipped a step going straight to the so-called 'final' design.

I need to cut it down to its most basic parts and see if I get feedback on that.

If I get positive feedback on just the raw functions that would be motivating!
Software crystallizes business processes
I really appreciate it when earlier conversations are pointed to. (The additional points/comments/age numbers are wonderful, too, if you feel up to providing them.)

I wonder if a bot could be written to automate this? There are lots of horrible reasons one could have for writing a HN comment bot, so I'm hesitant to even suggest it, but this seems like a really useful/good bot.
If I didn't overlook something it only states something about hardware market shares. Which are much easier to measure than software market share. (Although even in the hw market shares there might be a significant uncertainty due to DYI built computers which were quite common during the 90s.)
When those white breadboards came out that allowed you to wire entire circuits with no soldering at all it changed my life. Until then we would wire wrap, or solder to pieces of copper wire used as posts stuck in, erm, breadboard. chips always went into a socket holder whose leads were then soldered to the breadboard (or wire-wrapped).

My first was a HeathKit digital electronics course which contained power supplies, sources of +5/0 V, and leds to read output.

Man, this takes me back...
Well thank goodness that imgur albums can't be submitted as evidence in court. I'm curious about a number of those images- when did Samsung ever use the Apple dock connector (or something that looks like it) on their phones? When did they copy and paste an iOS screenshot onto their phone?
The UK government is spending millions on a police stakeout of the embassy. While this is nominally about a sex offence, given what has been reported about what happened, is that really a good use of my tax money?

I've had belongings in excess of 5000 GBP stolen. All I got from the Met was a victim support letter, no more than 50p worth of paper, envelope and franking.

So to me there is clearly a political agenda in his persecution; there is a conspiracy against him. In defence of liberty and in opposition to government tyranny, I cannot, in good conscience, not support him, in some way.

PS: He is not a US citizen, and alleged crimes were not committed on US soil. By what right does the US investigate him?
And Fa¢ebook doesn't have the same impact.
I have one, I used it, I got significant hate-mail, I decided I didn't need the bile I got, I discontinued it.
Pagina de viajes a tanger
> But really, it seems like it's way less than 95%. No monopoly.

Although there are no hard and fast rules, to be considered a Monopoly in the UK, for example, you only need to have a minimum 25% market share.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly
Title doesn't match the content at all. I thought this might be an official announcement re: the future of XNA.
Eh, I guess. I've experienced a lot of career fields at their mid-levels, swap "solution", "right libraries", "bugs" and "developers" with your nouns of choice and that's a pretty universal thing.

Maybe what you mean is that impatience is more of an accepted thing among programmers? I can get behind that.
Ask HN: I'm building a startup, should I do LLC or C-corp? Why?
I am building a startup and want to incorporate it, I was gonna do LLC but someone suggested C-corp. What's the benefit(s) of one over the other for startups specifically and why?
They had so much downtime in the early days that their 500 page became a meme http://www.whatisfailwhale.info/
Quality + Simplicity - the Sweet Spot
Perhaps the fact that human brains seem hardwired to perceive relative differences by orders of magnitude is an argument for graphing logarithmically by default, instead of linearly.
With Foreign Policy Speech, Romney Runs for Obama’s Second Term
Excellent advice. But I don't like the question, "Will you pay X?" People spend imaginary money differently than real money.

Instead, ask for them to write a letter saying that when the product is released, they intend to sign up and pay X. Wikipedia has more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_intent

This does not legally commit them to paying; if you deliver junk, they can pass. But it's serious enough that people behave much more like a real purchase.

Or, given that there are good mockups, the initial website could test prices. If they select a plan and click "sign up" you can capture their email address and plan selection.
I don't think that's true. I think doing great work in the major problems in your field of choice are the exact heights that entrepreneurialism should strive for.

(Disclaimer: I recently wrote an essay arguing this same thing, for designers, for the upcoming issue 03 of Distance, which you can subscribe to at http://distance.cc/)

This essay was a turning point for me as a professional, when I found it, years ago. Entrepreneurs have the benefit of being able to look for and solve important problems in any field. And what makes a problem important? Here's how you adapt Hamming's essay on important pure science into important design work:

What makes a problem important? It’s not the end result: responsive web design provides a new way to build sites, but it’s not the only way. Rather, importance is a factor of solubility: important problems are answerable, if only you could connect the right dots. Important problems advance understanding. Marcotte figured out how to unify design rhetoric across many devices, but he probably didn’t know he was going to get there when he started in 2009: the iPad didn’t exist yet, and neither his articles nor his book mention “iPhone” or “mobile” or even just “phone” in a relevant context.

You can't know exactly what field to work in, but you can stay active in places where something might happen. Maybe these places are where the work is diligent rather than sexy – like documenting the history of interaction design, saving rare hardware, or preserving old books. Maybe they are social and cultural, like educating designers on the value of professional practices, designing supportive professional societies, and building tools for study. Or maybe the future will be built on defining best practices for future tools and their interactions. Wherever you see important problems, you’ll do great work by sharing your explorations with others.

I go on to give examples of important problems facing designers today. They're everything from how we design, to big data, to the internet of things, to natural user interfaces.

You can solve major problems in online payments, and then solve major problems in electric vehicles, and then solve major problems in space travel. You don't have to be limited by your field of academic research, and your lunch tables of chemists and mathematicians can be those of any industry in the world.

Working on important problems means your work will have long-term meaning.
US Air Force's flying saucer plans declassified
Considering the pictures start with 1) app icons 2) app menu which well... just makes sense the way it's done - wall of icons design was around forever (win ce phones at least) 3) comparing google maps to google maps - it's not a great way to prove anything.

(the other pictures of external design are pretty similar though, no disagreement there)
I have actually been to Startup Weekends before. They're awesome!

They always say you can't work on things you've already started on - so I'm a bit dubious about it sounding like "hey build this for me guys".

They are a great way to build stuff no doubt.
Life isn't a perpetual data structures class.
Is this article not insight porn itself?

Also I can never get through anything with such broad generalizing statements.
This was on the SVT news yesterday, very interesting study...
Certainly they copied some things, just as all companies copy good features from their competitors (this is a good thing; it's called progress).

But trade dress protection is not intended to prevent intellectual dishonesty or protect intellectual property or any other notion of fairness between companies. It is there for a specific practical purpose: to protect consumers from confusion.

But Apple's branding is so effective and distinctive that confusing consumers about what is or isn't an Apple product would be quite difficult without straight up violating their trademarks. Look again at the gallery you linked to, and instead of asking "Did Samsung copy Apple?", ask yourself "Could a shopper looking for a smartphone in a store honestly confuse these two products?"

Also, the iPod connector? Nothing to do with the Galaxy S. That's probably just a Samsung iPod connector, for you know, iPods and iPhones. The Galaxy S uses micro-USB.
That's why they've been doing it for years...

He didn't say it was easy.
That seems like a strange definition. I guess both Apple and Google have monopolies in the tablet market, then, by the UK definition. Although that obviously seems contradictory.

I'm going by the typical colloquial definition (which might be closer to the real definition outside the UK), that a monopoly is when there's basically just one option and that market dominance can be used to harm competitors and consumers.
10 Amazing Visualizations About the US Elections